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How to copy a YouTube transcript without timestamps

Written by the VidWords Team · August 20, 2026 · Updated August 20, 2026 · Report a correction

Three easy ways to remove timecodes from any YouTube transcript — one-click clean TXT export, the YouTube viewer toggle, and regex cleanup.

When you copy a transcript from YouTube's native viewer, every single line gets interrupted by timecodes like 0:15, 0:18, 0:22. If you paste that text into Microsoft Word, Google Docs, ChatGPT, or Claude, it looks like a shattered wall of numbers and broken phrases.

Whether you want to read a lecture like an article, summarize it with an LLM, or quote a creator, here is how to get a clean YouTube transcript without timestamps.

Method 1: One-click clean text on VidWords (Fastest)

1. Copy the YouTube video link.
2. Paste it into VidWords and click Get transcript free.
3. In the transcript toolbar, set the layout dropdown to Plain text.
4. Click Copy.

Plain text is the one view that carries no timecodes: it joins every caption cue into one continuous block of prose, ready to read, print, or feed into an AI prompt. The other two layouts keep timestamps on purpose — Paragraphs prefixes each merged paragraph with one [mm:ss], and Timestamped lines keeps one per cue. The Download button is timestamped in every format, .txt included, so use Copy for clean prose.

Method 2: The YouTube viewer "Toggle timestamps" trick

YouTube does have a built-in toggle to hide timestamps, though it is hidden in a menu:

1. Open the video on YouTube in a desktop browser.
2. Click ... More in the description box and choose Show transcript.
3. In the transcript drawer on the right, click the three vertical dots (⋮) at the top right corner.
4. Click Toggle timestamps. The timecodes will disappear.
5. Select the text and copy it (Ctrl+A / Cmd+A or drag-select).

Limitation: While this removes the numbers, YouTube still puts every 3 to 6 words on a new line. When pasted into a document, you will still have awkward line breaks on every phrase that you must manually delete.

Method 3: Removing timestamps with Regex in a text editor

If you already have a raw transcript full of timestamps and want to clean it up in VS Code, Sublime Text, or Notepad++:

1. Open the Find & Replace panel (Ctrl+H or Cmd+Alt+F).
2. Enable Regular Expressions (the .* icon).
3. In the Find field, enter: ^\d+:\d+(?::\d+)?\s* (or \n\d+:\d+\n if timestamps sit on their own lines).
4. Leave the Replace field empty and click Replace All.

Why removing timestamps saves AI tokens and improves quality

When you feed a transcript into ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, timestamps consume up to 25% of your context window with useless number tokens. More importantly, timecodes break sentence structures, causing LLMs to lose context and produce lower-quality summaries.

Providing clean, contiguous paragraphs allows the model to understand the full flow of arguments, find key ideas faster, and generate more accurate takeaways.

FAQ

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